The 18 books I read this year that worth me more than a PhD in Data Science
In 2016 I was at the first year of my PhD in Data Science while I worked as a Data Scientist at GetNinjas. I had already finished all of the classes (I started early, during my Masters), fact that allowed me to start working in a full-time job, so I basically spent the entire year preparing for my project (about Probabilistic Graphical Models), reading “Introduction to Statistical Relational Learning”. By the end of the year, I realized the gigantic amount of time that I spent on this single topic that was not even applicable to my daily problems and the fact that I would spend more 2–3 years doing the same — it really scared me. I could be learning and growing much more with that time. I would like to learn economics, psychology, business, people, product, management even math and statistics in a broader way. So I decided to drop my PhD, and that’s the best thing I’ve ever done.
In the beginning of 2017, I was the Data Scientist of one of our teams here at GetNinjas. Three months later, we gathered two developers and three data scientists that were spread across other teams and created a Data Science Squad. I accepted the challenge to be the Product Manager of this team and also manager of some of our future data science hires, and the main reason which made me prepared to overcome this challenge was the amount of time I invested in reading books, time that before was dedicated only to my PhD.
From Data Scientist to Product Manager of a team
As a Data Scientist, I was constantly enhancing our Product at my area of expertise: developing new Data Science Projects. When I became Product Manager and also manager of other Data Scientists, I would have to lead People to develop new projects— and this task is something you usually don’t learn at a PhD.
As we work at a StartUp, our team needs to be developing innovative solutions on daily basis and to guide them to that I have to understand both the business and my team’s products profoundly . It’s also mandatory to understand how the scientists of the team work so that I can create and evolve the best processes for the team and to be capable of coaching them as their leader.
During the year I concluded that I also have to be an architect, constantly building bridges between people. I have to constantly transmit my company’s stakeholders vision and objectives to my team so that we can design new projects and later sell this projects to the stakeholders. Often we need to work with other teams too, most of the time the functional ones such as Infrastructure, QA and so on. To build this bridges communication is a core skill.
I also manage how my team is working, ensuring we’re using the most-suitable Processes and tools — to organize our work, to create gather new ideas, to ensure we are achieving our team’s goals . The processes also helps to define what projects we’ll be working at (following company’s vision) and when (prioritization), pointing out the business value, risk and technical complexity to develop from each project or feature. With all of that it’s possible to draw the team’s roadmap.
The books that I read to overcome this challenge
The list of 18 books I read during 2017 was the main source of knowledge for me to grow and became a good product manager and a great leader of people. I labeled each one of them in one of the three areas of the diagram above but they taught me much more things than only that.
1. About Processes and Tools
The first book I read in the year was Sprint, it teaches how to make Design Sprints, a structured group dynamic used to validate a project in one week (light-years better than group brainstorming). I extracted parts from it to made some dynamics with my team during the year and it helped us came up with some great projects. Both Scrum and Lean Startup helped me to create and evolve the processes for my team. Agile and lean are definitely some of the management mindsets more disseminated of this decade so far. The phoenix project gives an overview of how and unorganized TI area can kill a business. It also teaches you how to fix it, dealing with constraints and prioritizing what’s really important to be competitive again.
When you need to present a new idea from your team to the stakeholders you must show numbers to support it, and Storytelling with data is the book that taught me how to do that. It shows how to present graphs/results/metrics in a manner that everyone could focus on what’s really important. How to lie with statistics is similar, but more focused in the statistical point of view of the content of the graphs instead of the structure: it warns about things you should avoid to don’t mislead people. Together they are a powerful tool to presentation tasks.
2. About People and Leadership
The Servant is an incredible book that taught me how to be a good leader, by serving people doing providing their needs. It allowed me to be more connected to my team members, solve their daily problems and to increase the trust with them. High Output Management in the other hand is focused on how to manage, it was really useful for me as a guide since I’m also a manager (‘how to make an interview’ section is also great). Management 3.0 treats the people at the team as a complex and fundamental resource, it helps understand how to deal with a team of people in a Agile environment, instead of focusing on frameworks and the processes.
Mindset and 7 habits of highly effective people were two of the most pleasant and most startling books I read in my life. To manage others, first you have to manage yourself. And this is exactly what they teach you how to do. It also helped me to understand diversity of people in a way I’ve never imagined before. Presence is a book about psychology that teaches you how to posture correctly when talking to people and believe me, it helps a lot when you have to deal with a team with strong opinions.
3. About Product: Data Science
Data Science for Business was helpful, giving a high level review of machine learning techniques in applicable problems, along with Naked Statistics which teaches basic statistics. Data Science from Scratch gives a really easy-to-understand intro to both ML and Statistics using Python (a must known for me since is the main language of my team). For more advanced readers Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an incredible rich approach to ML, it didn’t go for the proofs and mathematical demonstrations but it presents all of the concepts its theoretical foundations. (Bonus: it teaches you some R too).
Naked Economics seems like an outlier here, but the manner Charles Wheelan explains how the right incentives can influence people to change their behavior in a beneficial way was a valuable lesson. Despite of that Economics is a very important topic if you work at a strategic position in any company (plus one of my team’s responsibility is the pricing of our products). At last, The Everything Store tells the story of Amazon.com, it basically shows you everything entrepreneurship is about, and any Product Manager should be an entrepreneur of its own product (Also, amazon letters to shareholders is a must-read for any entrepreneur of our age in my opinion).
Besides the books I also read at least one business magazine at each month, such as “Pequenas Empresas Grandes Negócios” and “Você S/A”. I also read Medium posts and blog articles here and then (some that worth a book). I could write an article about each one of these books but I’ll be too long to read and there are great summaries from each one of them in the internet.
To conclude
The message I want to pass to you Data Scientist, Product Manager, Product Owner, Developer, CS agent or even CEO: Read! Not just your speciality, read about everything, read about things you don’t understand, read about things you don’t like.
In worst case scenario I can ensure you that you’ll grow and live a better life for yourself but at the best case you will do incredible things to change the world around you!
Please readers, any books suggestions will be gladly accepted and any discussions about any of these books teachings will also be great :-)
